A Study Of Correlations Among Self-efficacy, English Reading Anxiety And Reading Performance Of Non-english Majors

Since the1970s, a large number of studies have shown that the learner’s emotional state is one of themost important factors that leads to success or failure of foreign language learning. Among the manyemotional factors, self-efficacy and language anxiety have great influence on language learning.Self-efficacy was firstly put forward by Albert Bandura in1977and was supported by a lot ofempirical researches to get further enriched and developed. For a long time, Self-efficacy theory has beenextensively studied and applied in the field of psychology and pedagogy, and has achieved fruitfulachievements. But in foreign language teaching and research, related research needs to be further expandedand studied. The psychological factors, such as self-efficacy, have a great influence on the languagelearning. In this study, foreign language self-efficacy refers to the subjective judgment whether studentshave the ability to successfully complete the foreign language learning or not.Anxiety is a key variable which would lead to affective disorders in learning. American psychologistHorwitz, E.K. put forward the concept of foreign language anxiety as early as1986, he believes that foreignlanguage anxiety is produced in the process of foreign language learning and classroom foreign languagelearning, and it is an unique synthesis of self-perception, beliefs, feelings and behavior. Students who suffera high level of foreign language learning anxiety fear of speaking and learning, even avoid studying foreignlanguage, which results in a low grades.Reading is an important language input and plays a significant role in English learning，especially forEnglish learners of western china. However, It is obvious that despite excessive time and energy areinvested by both teachers and students, college English reading has not achieved desired results. How toimprove reading ability is still a difficult problem in reading teaching. Because self-efficacy, readinganxiety plays an important role in improving the reading ability, so this study did the research from thatperspective.Based on the previous researches, the author tried to explore the correlations among self-efficacy,English reading anxiety and reading performance in the thesis. This author chose115freshmen ofnon-English majors in Northwest Normal University as subjects, and employed SPSS to classify andanalyze the results from GSES, FLRAS and Reading Test. Based on the specific analysis of self-efficacy,English reading anxiety and reading performance respectively, then the correlations of each two factors wasgiven. The major founding was that: 1There is a significant negative correlation between self-efficacy and reading anxiety, a strong senseof self-efficacy is helpful to ease the reading anxiety;2There is a positive correlation between self-efficacy and reading performance, and to some degreeself-efficacy is the predictor of students’ performance;3There is a negative correlation between reading anxiety and reading performance. Not only studentswith low reading level have reading anxiety, but also students with high reading level may get readinganxiety because of too high expectations.Through this study, the author hopes to provide useful suggestions for college students to improvetheir reading ability and performance and to lay a basis for the future study.